A Structure-Oriented Unsupervised Crawling Strategy for Social Media Sites

04/08/2018

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by   Keyang Xu, et al.

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Existing techniques for efficiently crawling social media sites rely on URL patterns, query logs, and human supervision. This paper describes SOUrCe, a structure-oriented unsupervised crawler that uses page structures to learn how to crawl a social media site efficiently. SOUrCe consists of two stages. During its unsupervised learning phase, SOUrCe constructs a sitemap that clusters pages based on their structural similarity and generates a navigation table that describes how the different types of pages in the site are linked together. During its harvesting phase, it uses the navigation table and a crawling policy to guide the choice of which links to crawl next. Experiments show that this architecture supports different styles of crawling efficiently, and does a better job of staying focused on user-created contents than baseline methods.